The author of the best-selling sub-chaser, The Hunt for Red October, launches a bigger confrontation: the USSR takes on NATO for a deadly bout of conventional warfare. Islamic extremists sabotage a major Siberian oil field, leaving the Soviet Union faced with years of fuel shortages. The hawkish Minister of Defense convinces the Politburo to take desperate action: Soviet forces will first neutralize NATO, then invade the Persian Gulf and seize control of its oil. To buy time for the troops to prepare, the Russians make a major arms-control initiative. But Bob Toland, an analyst for the National Security Agency, notices and reports unusual activity. Soon forces everywhere are on full alert. Teams of elite Red Army troops attack selected West German targets and a shooting war is on. A US base in Keflavik, Iceland, is shocked by a Soviet air and sea assault. The valuable post is lost, but not before a canny Air Force weatherman, Mike Edwards, and a small band of men escape and head for the barren Icelandic outback, where they radio reports of Soviet activity to satellite intelligence. The capture of Iceland not only cuts down on effective defense against subs, it also gives the Russians a handy launching spot for air raids on the convoys that are bringing supplies and soldiers across the Atlantic to Europe. Edward Morris, commander of the U.S.S. Pharris, defends the convoys and tracks shadowy subs until his ship is crippled. In Germany, tank battalions attack and counterattack. Skipper Dan McCafferty leads a pack of US subs deep into the Barents Sea, where they let loose a volley of missiles that hit bases within the Soviet Union itself. Finally, the Soviets, hard pressed, contemplate a "limited" nuclear attack, but several sane men manage to propel the crisis to a negotiated happy end. Clancy populates both armies with intelligent and likable men, arms them with astonishingly powerful weapons (for some, the virtuosity of these high-tech arms will be the book's greatest appeal), and succeeds in keeping the action crisp, absorbing The breadth of activity precludes the neat structure of suspense that distinguised Red October. But, still, an informative, readable, sometimes dazzling speculation on superpower war.
Pub Date: July 1, 1987
ISBN: 042510107X
Page Count: 637
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Sept. 20, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1986
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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